Escaping Spiritual Exhaustion : Michael John Cusick

Full-Text Transcript

If we’re feeling spiritually exhausted, as if there’s a disconnect between what we preach and teach about the abundant life in Christ and what we are currently experiencing, where do we turn?

Jason Daye
In this episode, I’m joined by Michael John Cusick. Michael is the CEO and Founder of Restoring The Soul, an intensive counseling ministry. He’s a licensed professional counselor and a spiritual director who served in vocational ministry for many years. Together, Michael and I explore the gap that ministry leaders often experience between what they believe about the divine love of God and what they experience in their own lives. Michael then provides a beautiful insight into the difference between being bad and being broken and how this understanding can impact your life, your relationship with Christ, your relationship with others, and your ministry. Are you ready? Let’s go.

Jason Daye
Hello, friends, and welcome to yet another insightful episode of FrontStage BackStage. I’m your host, Jason Daye. Each and every week, I have the honor and the privilege of sitting down with a trusted ministry leader, and we tackle a topic all in an effort to help you and ministry leaders just like you embrace healthy, sustainable rhythms so that you can thrive in both life and leadership. I’m very excited about today’s conversation and we are excited to be a part of the Pastor Serve Network. Each week, not only do we tackle a topic and dive into a conversation, but we create an entire toolkit freely available to our audience that allows you to go more deeply into the topic that we discuss. You can find this toolkit at PastorServe.org/network for this episode and for every episode. In that toolkit, you’ll find a number of resources, including our Ministry Leaders Growth Guide. Now, in that growth guide, you will find insights pulled from the conversation, and you’ll find some questions that you can process through personally. We encourage you to take your ministry leadership team through that as well and really to dig again more deeply into the conversation. So you can find that PastorServe.org/network. Now at Pastor Serve, we absolutely love walking alongside pastors and ministry leaders. If you’d like to learn more about how you can receive a complimentary coaching session with one of our trusted coaches, you can find that information at PastorServe.org/freesession. Now, if you’re joining us on YouTube, please give us a thumbs up and take a moment to drop your name, the name of your ministry, or the name of your church in the comments below. We love getting to know our audience better, and our team will be praying for you and for your ministry. If any questions pop up during this conversation again, be sure to drop them in the comments below. If you’re following us on another podcast platform, we encourage you to follow or to subscribe. Be sure to subscribe if you’re joining us on YouTube. We do not want you to miss out on any of these great conversations. I’m excited, as I mentioned, to have Michael John Cusick on the show. Michael, welcome.

Michael John Cusick
Hi, Jason. It’s so good to be here. Thank you.

Jason Daye
Yeah, it’s such a joy to have you, Michael. Your ministry and our ministry are involved in kind of the same world, really coming and walking alongside pastors and ministry leaders. Many have experienced brokenness, experienced challenges, and some have experienced failures and just wrestling with a lot of different feelings that we have as humans as we process through life and as we process through ministry. So good to have you on the show with us. Now, one of the things that we’re going to spend some time talking about is kind of a phenomena that many pastors or ministry leaders might experience, and that is the disconnect between what we believe about God, what we believe about the gospel, what we teach, what we preach, the things that we talk about and disciple people around, and then our own experience of God. That might sound wild, but so many, I think, watching and listening, and many of us, if we haven’t experienced ourselves, have a colleague in ministry who has, who feels this disconnect from a real-life dynamic relationship with God and what we preach about, what we teach about, and how we instruct and disciple others. So, Michael, you’ve spent a lot of time focusing on the spiritual, and the psychological, and how these pieces come together as a professional therapist and spiritual director. Michael, why do we wrestle with this in ministry when we’ve learned, when we’ve taught, and when we study about the goodness of God? Why is there sometimes this disconnect between what we are preaching and what we’re experiencing ourselves?

Michael John Cusick
I think the answer to that question, Jason, is really two-fold. Maybe one answer, but two sides of the coin. The first goes back to Genesis 3, and that is that we have a proclivity based on a deception from the serpent. In the case of Genesis 3, we have a proclivity to not trust love. We have a proclivity to step away from dependency, from being cared for, or from getting our needs met in a way that’s actually outside of our control. Then the other side of the coin is the fact that life is hard, and the moment we come into the world, from infancy through all of our lives, from womb to tomb, if you will, that there’s an assault against our heart. John Eldridge said many years ago in his book Waking the Dead that the story of our lives is a long and sustained assault against our heart by the one who knows who we could be and fears us, and it is the story of a long and relentless pursuit of our heart by the one who knows us intimately and who is restoring our souls. So those of us who are in ministry on the front lines, if you will, come into ministry more often than not, with or because of wounds that we have, and we want to bring hope and healing. But the very work of leadership means that we’re wounded, whether it’s through minor disappointments, whether it’s through difficulties with a leadership team, whether it’s with feedback that we get about our sermons, or whether it’s the fact that we simply bump up against a wall that performing and achieving can’t really give us what our hearts long for, which is to be loved and known unconditionally. So ministry has this kind of cruel setup in it, if you will, where the temptation is always to do for God in an attempt to either have our hearts become whole or in an attempt to try to fill ourselves up. It’s the difference between doing ministry standing at an old-fashioned pump well, where you’re pumping the well up and down to try to get water to flow, versus being in a reservoir where you’re opening a faucet and something flows from within. It’s really about our cup overflowing, like Psalm 23 talks about, versus us going down to the water and getting buckets of water. That disconnect is actually part of God’s recipe for us to know him. It’s not that there’s something wrong with us; it’s that we’re human and dependent, and therefore, it’s that experience of life outside of the garden that always draws us back. But we’ve created a culture, probably from as early as the church has existed. This isn’t a modern post-COVID phenomenon. We’ve created a culture where we can’t talk about it and where the expectation and pressure is that if we’re in leadership or if we’re following Jesus, somehow seriously, that our lives should be all together when actually the opposite is true. Blessed are the poor in spirit. That’s the blessed life.

Jason Daye
Wow, that’s great, Michael. As we kind of process through this, a couple of things that you touched on there is this idea that there is evil in the world, right? We live in a fallen world, and this is coming against us. Those of us who are serving in ministry. We talk about this, Michael, that’s why I kind of grin about this. We talk about how Jesus told us that we will face trouble in this world. We talk about that in ministry, that there will be challenges. Yet, whenever we come up against those, time and time again, when we are wounded, as you said, sometimes we struggle with accepting that woundedness as a reality of the work that we do, the ministry that we do, and somehow feeling like man things aren’t living up to what I thought this whole idea of an abundant life that Christ invites us into is all about. So Michael, can you help us kind of like process through that disconnect with this idea that, okay, we know that we’ll face trouble, but when we’re actually facing trouble, when we’re actually experiencing these things, we’re struggling and thinking, well, maybe this isn’t all that we thought it would be.

Michael John Cusick
Yeah. So, we are all filled with contradictions. We are new in Christ, and we are saints. We are no longer sinners. But there’s this idea that there are parts of me that are light, and there are parts of me that are dark. There are parts of me that want God, and every morning, I try to pray Psalm 25. To you, Oh Lord, I lift up my soul, in you I trust, do not let me be put to shame or let my enemies triumph over me. Five minutes later, my mind and my heart are thinking about the new expensive watch that I don’t need but that I want, that I think will really make me happy, or trading in my three-year-old car because it’s getting kind of obsolete. I need a newer, better sound system and for my phone to link up without a wire. These things can preoccupy me, especially when I’m stressed out and especially when my wife and I might have had tense words. So what we typically do, whether it’s something “benign” like that, whether it’s an addiction that we have, or panic attacks that we’re having, is we tend to either perform or hide in those situations. The hiding actually takes us out of the reach of love and care and the possibility of our heart’s deepest desire, which is to be deeply known and loved, which ultimately happens with God. But there’s the potential for that to happen with a select few others. The minute we hide, we disallow the possibility of being deeply known and loved. So that leaves an emptiness and a hole in our hearts, it creates an ache and potentially shame. So it sets us up to perform even more or to hide even more, and our lives become more armored or insulated. So the other side of it is to perform. That if I somehow read enough books, if I somehow listen to enough podcasts, or even if I somehow come to Pastor Serve or Restoring the Soul, our ministries that both address Christian leaders, somehow I’ll be able to get everything together. But the reality is, is that we never get everything together, and it’s the acceptance of that fact that always leads us back to grace, always gives us the opportunity to be held and to rest and trust in the arms of divine love, and that divine love looks like the person of Jesus. So God’s invitation is, especially for leaders in the midst of what we are called to do, to first and foremost have a commitment to being, dwelling, and abiding. If anybody’s watched one of your podcasts, they know that this is a thread through everything that you talk about, this idea of having sane rhythms. But there’s often a rhythm deep inside of us, which is restless, which is fearful, which has been traumatized, or which may believe things about God, where a leader like myself can preach one thing to 1000s of people, but not be able to preach that to myself. So often and for so long in my faith, especially before I was a counselor and I was involved in youth ministry and discipleship, and campus ministry. I would passionately, deeply, and sincerely share with people truths about God that were life-changing, but I was unable to internalize them myself because of the brokenness that I had not yet addressed and surrendered not only to God but to one other person.

Jason Daye
Yeah, so let’s talk a little bit, Michael, about that reality because many watching or listening might be feeling that exact thing. You just hit it on the head. Yes, I am serving. I am discipling others. I’m teaching and preaching, and yet I’m not experiencing that same truth for me. In your book, Sacred Attachment, your newest book, you talk about several things and go very deeply into them, but one thing you touch on is the idea of us being broken versus us being bad. Can you open that up for us? Can we dive into that a little bit? Because I think this is something that we struggle with in ministry because we think of good versus bad, we think in those ways. But brokenness is a very real thing that we often preach about and teach about, but then it’s hard for us to reflect upon that in our own lives.

Michael John Cusick
Yeah, you bet. So broken not bad is a phrase that I found my therapist using with me starting about 20 years ago because I had these deeply seated beliefs that I was worthless, that I was a bad person, and that God loved me based on my performance. I would have died on the hill that I’m saved by grace, but I also would have been able to say with scripture that I was sanctified by me working my butt off and by me performing for God, and that’s simply not true. It was Oswald Sanders that said sanctification is simply living in the reality of justification and trusting in that matter, on and on and on. So I think the default setting, if you ask the average Christian, what’s the problem with humanity? Why do people have panic attacks, etc, etc? Why do people struggle with pornography? Well, because we’re bad, we’re sinners. The reality is, why do we sin? Oftentimes the answer is, well, because we’re really, really bad sinners, or we’re totally depraved, and we come up with theology around that. But the fact of the matter is, we sin because there are other realities in our life that lead us to mishandle our pain or to mishandle our emptiness. So I’ve come up with five W’s. These are not gospel, but they’re just ways of talking about our brokenness. You’re right, Jason, that in the last 10 years, especially, there’s been a lot more permission and conversation in the church about our brokenness. But I will often ask people and say, so what is brokenness? People will usually go to Psalm 51 where it says, David says, You, oh God, desire not burnt offerings or sacrifices, but a broken and contrite spirit. The answer to what that means is usually something like to feel really, really bad about what I’ve done or really, really bad about where I am in my life, that I’m not trusting God, that I’m not doing more for him. That I have a marriage that’s less than ideal, and my wife thinks she doesn’t respect my ministry because of our relationship. But really, what David is saying is that you want a broken and contrite spirit, It’s him saying, maybe in our modern language, God, what you desire is for me to finally acknowledge that I’ve got no game, that my brokenness is my poverty. It’s my spiritual poverty. Saint Theresa of Lisieux, who died at 24 years old in the late 1800s and became a doctor of the church, said that our spiritual poverty alone is our capacity for God. So the capacity and the ability to take in God’s love and to be free to live in His presence is our acknowledgment of our poverty. Like in Isaiah 55 where the prophet is echoing Jesus’ word, or not echoing, preceding Jesus’ words in John 7 where Jesus got up and said, If anyone is thirsty, come to me. It’s interesting that the word “if” is there, right? There’s a precondition that we come to Jesus with our thirst, otherwise we really have no need for Jesus. But the prophet says that all you who are thirsty, come, you who have no money, come and buy the richest of fare, wine, bread, and milk. In the Near East culture and the agrarian, harsh world, wine, bread, and milk were rare, precious commodities. What he’s saying there is that the only way that you can buy in the economy of God is to acknowledge that you’re impoverished, that you’ve got nothing, that your credit card’s maxed out, that your checkbook is in the red, that your piggy bank’s been broken, and your ability to even work a part-time job to put a few dollars in your pocket has been compromised. So we would say, yes, we’re saved that way, but we also live in Christ that way, and this idea of abiding becomes meaningful when we’re impoverished. So to start out, the first W in these five, and feel free to stop any time because I can get pretty passionate about this. The first W of our brokenness is not about sin per se because I could say wickedness as the first W. It’s wretchedness. For anybody who’s rolling their eyes and who might tune out with that word of wretchedness, going, Okay, so we’re going to focus on how bad we are. Here’s some good news. If you look up the word wretched in a dictionary, it’ll simply say something like vile and despicable. if a person is wretched, they’re vile and despicable. So we know the song, amazing grace how sweet the sound that saved a wretch like me. I once was lost, and now I’m found, I was blind, and now I see. So I saved a wretch like me. How many times have I been in church singing that song and thinking, yep, you saved somebody terrible, bad, unworthy, and worthless like me? But the word wretch means impoverished. Charles Dickens used that word in Old English referring to a homeless child who would be standing on a street corner selling matches or some kind of wares to be able to feed themselves that day. The most literal word for wretched is someone who’s in exile, and that may be through their own fault or not having anything to do with them. But what if we thought about this word wretched as I’m somebody who is impoverished, I have no resources to bring. It was just Christmas. So let me say it this way, like The Little Drummer Boy. What if the most successful lead pastor with the most best-selling book could only simply come to God and say, I have no gift to bring pa rompa pom pom, but I’m going to beat this little drum that I have? Frankly, that’s where we’re all at. So that’s wretchedness, and in that absence, in that having no game, in that poverty, then we all kick in a way to try to make up for that, and that becomes one of the ways that we mishandle our pain. But the second W is our weakness. This gets confusing because I used to think about my weakness, and I would immediately go to Philippians, 4:13, I can do all things through Christ who strengthens me. So I don’t have to be weak. But our weakness is our human limitation and vulnerability, and again, the most equipped, intelligent, skilled, gifted pastor among us has limitations and vulnerabilities, and what our human nature wants to do is we want to cover those up. We come into the world and on the video now, if anyone’s listening, I’m holding my hands kind of up in front of me. We come into the world with our gifts, our abilities, and our talents, and we put those out there to the world and to our community, and we say, This is who I am. Love me. Like me. Tell me that I’m okay. Tell me that I have value. Tell me that I’m significant. See me, if you will. We take our vulnerabilities, our limitations, our weaknesses, the things that we’re ashamed of, and we put them behind our backs, and we drive our hands deep into our pockets, saying no one can ever see that. The problem with that, once again, is that it takes those parts of us out of the embrace of love, and we say that part of me can’t be known because that’s unacceptable. What it also does is it creates this duality or this compartmentalization inside of us, where we’re preaching to other people that God loves you just as you are, but in our own lives, we’re saying God loves these wonderful things about me, but he can’t love these other things about me, and therefore people will love these parts of me but not the other parts of me. So that’s our weakness, and rather than hiding our weakness or trying to compensate for it, I like to use the term that we’re called to steward our weakness. Everybody knows what it means to steward a percentage of your income. But what if, like Paul said, I boast in my weakness, in other words, I’m aware that my weakness is not simply a vulnerability, it’s a superpower. This is not just well, as I’m preaching a sermon, I’m going to be a little bit vulnerable in my sermon. That’s a great starting point. Share about a time, 30 years ago when I had a struggle, but begin to really live out the reality as a foundational value, a core value of preaching and leadership, that when I am weak, I am strong. I’ll often survey audiences if I’m speaking somewhere, and I’ll say, fill in the blank for this verse, when I am weak, blank. People will say he is strong because most people think that the scripture says, As Paul’s telling the story, when I’m weak, God is strong, therefore he’s going to come along and strengthen me. It’s actually really important to hear this point. The text says, when I am weak, I am strong. That in my vulnerability, in my impoverishment, in my having no game, maybe there’s somebody with cancer right now who’s going, God, how could this have happened? In this place of suffering and embrace and life just stopping suddenly and revolving around this illness, there’s actually a power that’s there that’s revealed in the crucified Christ. So that weakness is something that I have found in my ministry, and I know for you, as we talked about this beforehand, that the power of your ministry that I have great respect for is that you and all of your leaders have some kind of a story of brokenness becoming a point of transformation. So as we were talking about this disconnect earlier, and I want to make sure to come back to the third W. I’ve called that in my book The Delta. So the Greek letter delta is a triangle, and in science, medicine, and engineering, that symbol is used to represent the distance between the goal and the outcome. What is wanted and then what actually happens. Then they measure that and figure out how to close that. In the spiritual life, we’re not linear like that. In geometry, the shortest distance between two points is a straight line. But in the spiritual life, the shortest distance between two points is a winding, bumpy, mountainous road. But delta is not just that distance, it’s also what is real in a river that comes into the ocean. The delta of the Mississippi, for example. So you have freshwater or brackish water that is flowing into salt water, and in those two different realities, something new is generated. There’s something brand new. So there’s this and this that becomes that. I believe, if nothing else, the gospel is paradoxical, where these contradicting realities of our lives and of the world always present this third reality. So in Israel or Gaza, and wherever somebody might land on that political spectrum, in the midst of all of that suffering, the third reality is that God is there, that the kingdom is there, that it’s not the absence of God, but it’s the presence of God who’s always in the midst of suffering, that is what gives us hope. So when we tell the truth to ourselves because we know the truth will set us free, it’s in telling the truth to ourselves about our own story and potentially one other person, that something new emerges from that. So as we’re facing our own wretchedness and our own weakness the next W is our woundedness. Thankfully, the church, social media, and books, Christian and otherwise, are talking much more about woundedness in terms of trauma, relationships, how that actually affects us neurobiologically, how it affects our cognitive functioning, or how it affects our anxiety. So the pastor that’s reading Psalm 23 that’s trying to find the peace beside green pastures and still waters and wondering, why isn’t that available to me? Maybe it’s because something in your nervous system and your body is so deeply affected that you can’t receive that yet. So our woundedness are wounds of presence, things that happen that never should have happened. That might be historical in childhood. It could be relational in your family of origin. It could be on your leadership team. More than likely, people are experiencing that, and every one of our wounds matters to God. Why? Because God revealed Himself in Jesus as someone who was wounded and broken, who not just bore our sins on the cross, but who bore our infirmities and our diseases, as Isaiah 53 talks about. The other kinds of wounds are wounds of absence. For men in leadership, I’ve discovered that these are harder to deal with. There’s some pastors that go, Yeah, I grew up in an alcoholic family, or my father abused me, and yet, when we have an absence of being seen, soothed, safe, and secure in our family of origin, we learn to compensate without those but we go through life really being driven by woundedness. As a number of people have said, pain that is not transformed is pain that becomes transmitted. So if we don’t deal with the pain and the wounding in our own life, it’s going to be passed on somewhere, some way, somehow, and then that becomes an opportunity for evil to shoot its flaming arrows, as Ephesians 6 tells us, into the bullseye center of that pain, and transmit pain to congregations, to marriages, or to children, etc. So as we attend to our woundedness, our weakness, and our wretchedness, we’re actually beginning to create a very different legacy in our families and our marriages, in our communities, but also in our churches. The final W is wiring, and that is, I’ve already alluded to, our nervous system. The fact that we are neurobiological beings, and science tells us definitively that every interaction and experience we have shapes our brain. Jesus has given us, not a textbook if you will, but he’s given us a path and a way of thinking about doing life that allows our brain and our nervous system to not go into a fight or flight mode or freeze mode, but to live in a rhythm that allows our soul to rest and flourish in a way that was 2000 years in advance of what science now knows. Pretty brilliant.

Jason Daye
Yeah, that’s amazing. As you walk through those, Michael, lots of thoughts come to mind. I would like to touch on the final one real quickly, the idea of the actual habits, practices, or spiritual practices, can actually change, literally change how we think about things, and how we feel about things. If you could just share with us a little bit about that reality because this is science. This is how God created us, right? So there’s reality to this. It is so interesting to see how scripture, throughout Scripture, we see this shared, but how that meets up with what we are learning now, have learned in science, and the reality of that. So can you touch on that for us a bit, Michael?

Michael John Cusick
Yes, I didn’t write about this in the book, but it’s a subject that I’m very passionate about. Actually, I did have a chapter about this, but there were several chapters and we just wanted to thin the book out so I held it back. So in the future, I may be writing about this. But it’s Dallas Willard’s idea of indirection, that people don’t change spiritually directly, they change indirectly. So Willard said it this way, if you want to obey the commands, you’re eventually going to fail. If you try to become the kind of person that obeys the commands, you can actually succeed. So a listener might take their story or struggle and fill in the blank and say, if I want to stop being constantly anxious or people pleasing, or if I want to overcome my struggle with lust or overeating, I’m probably going to fail after my New Year’s resolution or my good attempt. But if I try to become the kind of person who is not anxious, who is not driven by lust, overeating, or whatever those issues are, then that’s a very different game. So it’s not trying to resist something, it’s trying to posture my heart, posture myself, and posture my body so that I can actually be calm, peaceful, and grounded. Proverbs 27:7 tells us, and I wrote about this in my book Surfing for God, about sexual compulsion, the one who is hungry, I’m sorry, the one who is full loathes honey, but to the one who is hungry, even what is bitter tastes sweet. So what we have to do is we have to find a way to become full, and that isn’t just full of God, somehow that I have so much God in me by reading the Bible more, but in an embodied way. To be calm, to be centered, to be self-aware, and to know from moment to moment what’s happening inside of us. So we’ve made this shift from living from the outside in, to the inside out, and that kind of attentiveness, particularly to our body, is what we therapists call somatic awareness. Soma from the Latin word for body. That kind of somatic awareness, I actually believe, is one of the new frontiers of how people will internalize and integrate the gospel into their lives, moving forward. Of course, it’s not new-fangled just because science is telling us about it. This goes back to long before Christ. My favorite Psalm right now is Psalm 131 where the psalmist says, Lord, I don’t concern myself with great matters, and my mind is not haughty, but I calm myself and I quiet my ambitions, and I’m like a weaned child with its mother, like a weaned child, I am content. At age 60, there’s still a lot that I want to do, and my mind can spin as I’m laying in bed at night, or when I get up in the morning and I see social media and all the allegedly wonderful lives that are out there, I start to spin in my ambitions. I tell myself, well, if my new book sells X amount of copies, then I’m going to be okay. Then I can kind of exhale and go, I’m all right or my life on earth has mattered. Ambitions are not just those kinds of things, but ambitions in that context are all of the strategies that I have inside to make my life work, all of the strategies that I have that come right back to these 4 Ss that I write about, the 4 Ss of attachment. We were created, and every infant needs to be seen, soothed, safe, and secure. At any given moment, my mind spins with strategies to try to be seen as better than I am, as more important or significant than I am. To be soothed, which is the ache, the boredom, the depression, the anxiety, the fear in my heart, the doubt, the shame, and things that can just rise to the surface at any given point. Now, let me also say, that I’ve made significant strides in my life with a lot of these things because since the age of 16, as a result of sexual abuse and trauma, I’ve been dealing with these things, but they never go away. They always create opportunities to lead me back to Jesus. So the three words that I think may answer your question for me that are in Psalm 131 are quiet, calm, and content, and I’m always working, and this is my mantra for 2025 is, Lord, I want to quiet myself because there are so many distracting voices and so many different parts on the inside that are telling me how I need to live life. I want to be calm. I was working with a therapist, a Christian therapist, many years ago, receiving therapy for myself, and the therapist said, Michael, you don’t know the difference between energy and adrenaline, do you? I looked at him like he was talking Greek. It was one of the most important things that was ever said to me. It wasn’t this big insight about my story, but I had lived my whole life on adrenaline. The next ministry opportunity, when I was a high school wrestler, the next tournament, or the next big goal I had. When I was a little boy it was the next birthday party or something like that. To a large degree, we’re meant to look forward to those kinds of things. But for me, without a secure attachment, and without my home being a safe place, I needed to always have the next thing that would kind of give me that shot of life is going to be okay, and so I never learned to be calm. So as this therapist began to explain this, I was like, so what’s the difference? He said, Well, have you ever thought about the anxiety within you? I said I’m not an anxious person, contradicting what I just kind of said because back then, I didn’t know it was anxiety. I just thought it was excitement or passion. But I’ve had a low level of anxiety inside of me for most of my life, and thankfully that has come down and is coming down, but if I am not in a place, and I’m going to kind of model this breath right now, where I say, taking a deep breath and pausing and saying, God, I need to quiet myself, and I am calming myself. Then the next thing I do after that, if I’m not in a calm place, is likely going to come out of my ego, my insecurity, my anxiety, and I’m not going to be present to others. I’ll be there and in relationship with them to kind of accomplish my task. I’m not really going to be listening. I just have this agenda that’s there. But if I calm myself and center myself, which is a practice that we can do, then I can actually begin to be content in the present moment. So I think the most compelling goal for a leader, as people talk about rhythms, is, what if I simply made it my goal to be present at all times, knowing that we’ll fail miserably, we’ll have, like, a .01% batting average with that, but that we can learn to be present in ways that begin to make huge differences in our interaction with others, and in our relationship with God because God just wants us to be present with him.

Jason Daye
Yeah, that’s powerful. That’s absolutely powerful. Michael, as we kind of assess, and I love the kind of holistic approach, which we should not be surprised at all about in reading scripture of how God is, it’s body, soul, and mind coming together, right? It’s this idea, and this is what we often in our modern minds separate and compartmentalize all of those things. But the reality is how the interconnectedness of this and the beauty in that, and the beauty of seeing God’s fingerprints all over that reality and embracing that for ourselves, I think, is huge. So as we think back to those 5 Ws and look at, and understand those, Michael. How can we think through our weakness, for example, our woundedness, those types of things with a sense of intentionality around them, as opposed to this is the world I grew up in? These are the circumstances I’ve encountered. This is the way I am. This is the way God made me. Or fill in the blank. Like almost saying, yeah, that is true, that is true, that is true. So that’s my lot in life. How do we move through falling into that temptation and embrace this idea that there is some intentionality around what it means to be living an abundant life in Christ?

Michael John Cusick
Yeah. So it’s relatively easy for me to wax eloquent and opine about the latest book or psychological insight or science, and that’s the guy I am, right? I live in that world. I’m a clinician, and I have a master’s degree in counseling psychology, which was a research evidence-based training, as well as my pastoral counseling degree. But I come back to the words of Jesus, if anyone is thirsty, come to me, and streams of living water will flow from within. So I would just say, where are the places within that feel like there’s no living water flowing? People will say, well, maybe there’s living water flowing in my ministry, or maybe not. When living water isn’t flowing in the ministry the way we desire, how does that affect you within? What are the feelings that come up? How does that affect you when your alarm goes off in the morning? Do you get up with a sense of dread? Because I’ve talked to countless, and I literally mean I’ve lost count, pastors and Christian leaders that talk about for X amount of years now, I’ve woken up every day or multiple times a week with dread. Sometimes it’s the day that they preach. Sometimes it’s on their day off because they don’t know what to do with themselves because they have no hobbies and they have no life outside of ministry. But what are the places inside where there’s not well-being? I’m using words very, very intentionally that are not pathologizing, right? So, we overly want to pathologize and diagnose everything. You know that if you’re feeling sad, you have a disorder, or if you’re feeling scared, you’ve got PTSD. Many people do. But where is there an absence of well-being on the inside? I’ve done so many retreats for leaders where I go into the retreat myself with my own neurosis, saying, I’ve got to do something profound and hit this out of the park, and oftentimes I’ll just say to people, what are you thirsty for? What are you thirsty for? I would say that this is sad, except I can relate to it so much myself. So often people will go I have no idea because I’ve not thought about my inner life. I’ve not thought about that place inside where Christ actually dwells. I just need to learn more, do more, strategize more, and that’ll kind of take care of itself, but it doesn’t. Back to your question about practices. Dallas Willard said that grace is not opposed to effort. It’s opposed to earning. I think that if leaders spent 20% of the time that they often spend preparing sermons, if they spent 20% of that time attending to their own inner life, maybe even included in this being, God, I have no idea how to intend to my inner life, but I’m going to sit in this room for 20 minutes in quiet and just be still, not to hear from you, not to have anything big happen. But just because I believe it’s important because Psalm 46 says, Be still and know that I’m God. We could translate that as be still so that you can know God. Be still so that you can be known by God because God loves to have the experience of us knowing that he’s knowing us. He’s like a parent who somehow takes joy in the fact that as they’re gazing into the eyes of their infant, that even though that infant doesn’t have a construct for parenting and unconditional love, that something in their neurons exhales and coos and is like a child weaned at its mother’s breast. That God takes joy in us knowing that he knows us, and the scriptures call that beholding. So I feel like I’m talking too much.

Jason Daye
No this is good, Michael. Yeah. No, this is good. Don’t feel that way at all. This is absolutely great and I’m just sitting here soaking it in for myself, as much as for the audience and everyone else who’s watching and listening along. This is an absolutely incredible conversation. I really want to encourage those of you who are watching and listening to check out Michael’s new book, Sacred Attachment. If you enjoyed this conversation, this is just scratching the surface of what Michael goes into. Michael, I would love if you be willing to share, if people want to connect with you, with your ministry, share a little bit about the ministry and how can they connect with you.

Michael John Cusick
Thank you for that. The ministry I run and founded in 2000 is called Restoring the Soul, as in Psalm 23:3. The website is RestoringTheSoul.com and we work with Christian leaders from all walks of life, from all over the world. Last count, I think we have leaders from 61 different countries, most English speaking as their primary language. But we offer 2-week intensive counseling programs, and about 50% of the people that come are in a proactive state of life, where they have a sabbatical coming up, or they just kind of want to do a deep look of making sure that they stay healthy. Then the other 50% are people that have hit a wall. They’ve fallen off a cliff. There’s significant brokenness in their life, there’s trauma, there’s anxiety, there’s relational difficulty, there’s addiction, and compulsion. You know, for many years, I specialized in working with sexual compulsion and addiction, especially pornography and infidelity. That’s not so much of what I do anymore. That’s because of my own story. So for people who don’t know, I was in ministry for 14 years. I was a passionate believer, memorizing Scripture, Bible study, and evangelism with Young Life. One day I came home from work, and my whole double life unraveled because I had been secretly acting out with pornography and with women, I had what was a growing alcohol issue, and I had to come to terms with that, and I really blew up my marriage. Thankfully, God rescued our marriage. But, you know, since then, I’ve gone through periods of having to deal with trauma. About seven years ago, I came to terms with the fact and was mercifully coming to understand that I’m on the autism spectrum with Asperger’s, or what used to be called Asperger’s, and that’s been very, very helpful in my life for why I’ve always felt a little bit like an outsider and a little bit quirky. So it’s almost as if, just when I think that I’m in a place of now I’m good and I’m not going to have to trust or do this work, there’s another thing that doesn’t feel like a gift at the time, but it actually becomes a gift. I love to quote Sheila Walsh, of all people, a former Christian contemporary music person, and she was the co-host of the 700 Club with Pat Robertson. She said in Leadership Magazine about 20 years ago. She said, One day, I was sitting with my inflatable hairdo and my three-piece business suit on the 700 Club as Pat Robertson’s co-host, and that night, I was locked in a psychiatric ward. She had had a nervous breakdown. She said, What I learned there is that sometimes some of God’s most profound gifts come wrapped in packages that make our hands bleed when we open the package, but inside, we discover what we’ve been looking for all of our lives. So I just want to say to anybody listening, who wants more, where they’re aware of this lack of integration between what they believe and what they actually experienced to say to God, I want more than this. This might have been utterly stupid, or it might been an act of faith, but many years ago, I said to God, while I was struggling with addictions and hidden brokenness, I said, God, if this is all there is to Christianity, where I’m successful on the outside, but on the inside I feel like a poser, there’s shame, there’s anxiety, and there’s trauma. If this is all there is then I don’t know I want to be a Christian. It was then that things started happening in my life that at the time, I would have said were horrible if they happened, but they became doorways into many, many, many gifts and depths of relationship and being known and ultimately, joy that I never could have anticipated. That’s why I say that our brokenness doesn’t need to be a barrier to the life that we’re called to live, but our brokenness can be a bridge to the abundant life, and always is when we surrender that to God and say, yes.

Jason Daye
Yeah, that’s so good, so powerful. Michael, thank you so much. Thank you for the ministry you’ve been doing. Thank you for the way that you’re impacting ministers, pastors, and ministry leaders around the world. We so appreciate how God is using you and your team and the impact that you’re having. Thank you for making time to hang out with us today and to share your heart. Looking forward to the next time, Michael. We already talked about, hey, there’s so much that we’d like to talk about that we’ll have to revisit this for sure. So thank you for making that time to hang out with me. For those of you who are watching or listening along, the links to Michael’s newest book, the ministry, all of those things, resources, and the toolkit so that you and your ministry team can dig more deeply into this conversation. It’s an incredible conversation that Michael and I just enjoyed here. You can find all of that in the toolkit for this episode. You can find that PastorServe.org/network, so please be sure to check that out and learn how you can connect more with Michael and with the conversation that we just had. Michael, it’s been an absolute pleasure. Thank you so much for sharing your heart with us, sharing how God has been at work in your life and through your life, and I’m so grateful that we’ve had the opportunity to have this conversation and for our audience to hear from you today.

Michael John Cusick
Thank you, Jason, it was a pleasure and a privilege.

Jason Daye
All right, brother. God bless you.

Jason Daye
Now, before you go, I want to remind you of an incredible free resource that our team puts together every single week to help you and your team dig more deeply and maximize the conversation that we just had. This is the weekly toolkit that we provide. And we understand that it’s one thing to listen or watch an episode, but it’s something entirely different to actually take what you’ve heard, what you’ve watched, what you’ve seen, and apply it to your life and to your ministry. You see, FrontStage BackStage is more than just a podcast or YouTube show about ministry leadership, we are a complete resource to help train you and your entire ministry team as you seek to grow and develop in life in ministry. Every single week, we provide a weekly toolkit which has all types of tools in it to help you do just that. Now you can find this at PastorServe.org/network. That’s PastorServe.org/network. And there you will find all of our shows, all of our episodes and all of our weekly toolkits. Now inside the toolkit are several tools including video links and audio links for you to share with your team. There are resource links to different resources and tools that were mentioned in the conversation, and several other tools, but the greatest thing is the ministry leaders growth guide. Our team pulls key insights and concepts from every conversation with our amazing guests. And then we also create engaging questions for you and your team to consider and process, providing space for you to reflect on how that episode’s topic relates to your unique context, at your local church, in your ministry and in your life. Now you can use these questions in your regular staff meetings to guide your conversation as you invest in the growth of your ministry leaders. You can find the weekly toolkit at PastorServe.org/network We encourage you to check out that free resource. Until next time, I’m Jason Daye encouraging you to love well, live well, and lead well. God bless.